Amos Lincoln during and after the War

I’ve been discussing the story of nineteen-year-old Amos Lincoln at the Boston Tea Party.

That wasn’t the end of Lincoln’s participation in the American Revolution. He was at the prime age for military service when the war began, and the lore about him says that his master, carpenter Thomas Crafts, Sr., “released him from his obligation as an apprentice, in consequence of his ardent desire to enter the army of his country.”

According to the Annals of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, Lincoln “was in the battle of Bunker-Hill, attached to General [John] Stark’s regiment.” That raises questions since Stark commanded men from New Hampshire. With family in Hingham, Lincoln would most likely have gone to the southern side of the siege lines and served under Gen. John Thomas. It’s possible the young man simply “attached” himself to the most convenient unit, or it’s possible later storytellers did the attaching for him.

The M.C.M.A. Annals also stated that Lincoln “was in the actions at Bennington [16 Aug 1777], Brandywine [11 Sept 1777], and Monmouth [28 June 1778].” That claim makes no sense, and not just because that would put him in two different armies during the same season.

We know from Massachusetts records that Amos Lincoln served mostly close to home. He joined the state artillery regiment commanded by his master’s son, Thomas Crafts, Jr. On 10 May 1776, Col. Crafts submitted a list of officers to the state government, and Amos Lincoln was made a captain-lieutenant. He was promoted to captain in January 1778 and remained at that rank as command of the regiment passed to Lt. Col. Paul Revere in 1779.

Boston tour guide Ben Edwards displays a return of a company of matrosses (artillery privates) that Capt. Lincoln filed with the state on 1 Jan 1781, while he was helping to guard Boston harbor. In lore this became that he was “at one time in charge of the castle,” and that he “commanded the company at Fort Independence which fired the salute at the first celebration of Independence Day in Boston, July 4, 1777.”

In 1873, T. C. Amory told this story about one of Capt. Lincoln’s campaigns:

while reconnoitring on one occasion with Lafayette, the latter suggested the importance of an earthwork at an advantageous point near by, and requested him to have it forthwith constructed. The work was already approaching completion when Colonel [John] Crane,—his immediate superior, who was also of the tea-party, and indeed seriously injured in the affair by the fall of a chest upon him,—rode by, and expressed his surprise and displeasure, inquiring by whose order he had acted. Lincoln replied that it was in obedience simply to the colonel’s master and his own, and soon made his peace by giving the colonel’s name to the fort.

This may refer to the abortive campaign against the British in Rhode Island in late 1778. Crane and Lafayette were there. But I don’t see any mention in Massachusetts records of Capt. Lincoln being assigned to that campaign.

The early profiles of Lincoln state that after the war he participated in putting down the Shays Rebellion. He worked as a master carpenter in the building of the new Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill. He was also a member of the St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons starting in 1777.

Amos Lincoln married Deborah Revere, daughter of his regimental commander, in January 1781. They had nine children, and Deborah died in January 1797. In May 1797, Amos married his sister-in-law Elizabeth Revere, and they had five more children, the first arriving at the end of December. Elizabeth died in April 1805, and in July Amos married the widow Martha Robb, and they had three more children.

Amos’s older brother Levi went into the law and was eventually U.S. Attorney General under Thomas Jefferson, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts under James Sullivan, and briefly acting governor. Levi’s sons Levi, Jr., and Enoch became governors of Massachusetts and Maine, respectively. One of Amos’s grandsons, Frederic W. Lincoln, was mayor of Boston for several years. Amos Lincoln’s obituary said he was “an undeviating disciple of Washington,” thus most likely a Federalist.

Amos Lincoln and His Prayerful Master

When Amos Lincoln died in 1829, the Columbian Centinel newspaper described him as “one of the intrepid band who consigned the Tea to the ocean, in 1773.” But it took another couple of decades before details of Lincoln’s story got into print.

The earliest version I’ve seen is in the Annals of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, compiled by printer Joseph T. Buckingham and published in 1853. It said:

AMOS LINCOLN was born in Hingham, March 18, 1754. At fourteen, he was apprenticed to a Mr. Crafts, of Boston, with whom he remained about six years. He was present at the destruction of the Tea in Boston harbor in 1773, (being then about nineteen years old,) and assisted in the execution of that intrepid act. It is related that his master, apprehending that he might be out on some perilous enterprize, prayed most earnestly that he might be protected and prospered, and was pleasantly disappointed the next morning when he returned in safety.

That’s not how I’d used the word “disappointed,” but I see what they’re getting at.

The Massachusetts Historical Society published a longer version of the tale in 1873 as it was observing the centenary of the Tea Party. Its Proceedings volume reported:

Mr. T. C. Amory expressed his wish to place on the honored roll two other names well known in our community, associated with the event which we this evening celebrate; namely, those of Amos Lincoln and James Swan. The former was born March 17, 1753, at Hingham. . . .

Lincoln…was apprenticed to Mr. Crafts, of Boston, who resided at the north part of the town, and still serving his time with him when the event occurred which is now commemorated. Mr. Crafts, possibly not wishing that his other apprentices should incur the consequences of so bold a proceeding, though not averse to Amos taking part in it, secretly procured an Indian disguise for him, and dressed him in his own chamber, darkening his face to the required tint.

As we find that “Thomas Crafts” joined, in 1762, St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons, which met at the Green Dragon Tavern, where, as well as at Edes & Gill’s printing-office, the arrangements for the night’s work were made, there is little doubt that he and Amos’s master was one and the same person.

(Actually, that was an error.)

Exemplary in his habits of devotion, he prayed long and fervently that the young man might be protected and prospered in his enterprise; and after some hours his anxieties were relieved by his safe return. That there was some solemn pledge among them not to reveal who were their associates, is evident from the reticence of all concerned; for, though Mr. Lincoln later acknowledged his own participation, he would not mention the particulars or betray the names of his companions.

Then came the profile of Amos Lincoln in Francis S. Drake’s Tea Leaves of 1884:

Born in Hingham, Mass., March 17, 1753, died at Quincy, Mass., January 15, 1829. He was apprenticed to a Mr. Crafts, at the North End, who, on the evening of December 16, 1773, secretly procured for him an Indian disguise, dressed him in his own chamber,—darkening his face to the required tint,—and then, dropping on his knees, prayed most fervently that he might be protected in the enterprise in which he was engaged. 

You’ll notice a discrepancy in these profiles about Lincoln’s birthdate. In fact, they’re all wrong. Hingham vital records state that Amos was born on 18 Mar 1753.

Finally, Edward G. Porter’s Rambles in Old Boston from 1886:

Captain Amos Lincoln…came from Hingham to Boston and engaged in house-building, being subsequently employed as carpenter for the new State House. Amos participated in the tea party of Dec. 16, 1773, obtaining his Mohawk disguise through the assistance of his master, Crafts, who, it is said, at family devotions prayed “for the young man out on a perilous errand” that night.

Who was Lincoln’s master? His name was Crafts, he lived “at the North End,” and he was a house carpenter. That must have been Thomas Crafts, Sr.

The Thomas Crafts who joined the St. Andrew’s Lodge was that carpenter’s son, Thomas Crafts, Jr. He was a japanner, or decorative painter, and he lived in the South End. He was deeply involved in Boston’s political resistance, from the first protests of the “Loyall Nine” in 1765 to the public reading of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Despite Thomas Crafts, Jr.’s prominence as a Patriot, he wasn’t listed as a participant in the Tea Party until his family published a family history in 1893. I suspect he might have become too well known to actually set foot on the tea ships.

The Crafts Family credited Amos Lincoln’s grandson, “Frederic W. Lincoln [1817-1898, shown above] (Mayor of Boston from 1857 to 1860 and from 1862 to 1866,)” with passing on the story of how the older Crafts had prepared him for the Tea Party and prayed for him. It’s possible that Frederic Lincoln was the source of all the published lore going back to 1853, or it’s possible that he collected at least some of that lore from printed sources and passed it on.

TOMORROW: Amos Lincoln’s crowd.

Amos Lincoln at the Tea Party

Back in 2006, I posted the first list of men who participated in the Boston Tea Party, published at the back of Traits of the Tea Party in 1835, followed by my best guess about who came up with that list.

I posited that those names came from Benjamin Russell (shown here), a Boston newspaper publisher and politician who came of age during the Revolution.

A lot of the names on that first list were members of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, which Russell headed. Items in his newspapers in the early 1830s showed someone in those offices was keeping track of Tea Party veterans as they died out.

Amos Lincoln, however, tests that hypothesis. He died on 15 Jan 1829, and two days later this notice appeared in Russell’s Columbian Centinel:

DIED.…

In Quincy, on Wednesday, Capt. AMOS LINCOLN, aged 75, formerly of Boston, and uncle of the Governors of Massachusetts and Maine,—a patriot and a soldier of the Revolution, he was one of the intrepid band who consigned the Tea to the ocean, in 1773,—commanded a company of Artillery during the first years of the Revolution, and sustained through life the character of an undeviating disciple of Washington, and that of an honest, useful man. His funeral will be this afternoon at 3 o’clock, from the residence of Mr. Nathan Josselyn, in Quincy.

Mr. Ezra Lincoln, aged 72, brother of the above, died suddenly at Hingham, on the preceding Sabbath.

Lincoln had also been a member of the Mechanic Association before moving out of Boston and letting his dues drop. The chronicler of that organization, Joseph T. Buckingham, even stated that Russell and Lincoln were friends.

Yet Lincoln does not appear on that first list of Tea Party members in 1835. Whoever compiled it must have missed or forgotten his Centinel obituary. Does that suggest Russell was not the source of that first list? Perhaps, although he could just as easily have forgotten the name of a man no longer living in town as anybody else.

In any event, Amos Lincoln was publicly identified as someone who helped to destroy the tea in 1829, when people who witnessed the furor of 1773 were still around. That recognition seems quite reliable.

It wasn’t until decades later that the more dramatic details of the Amos Lincoln story came out.

TOMORROW: The master carpenter’s prayer.